"Paul Sage introduced the members of the “Justice Team” who have been hard at work developing this massive new gameplay system for ESO" - is that a deliberate Futurama reference? I now can't help but think of Fry, Bender and Leela working on ESO while wearing their underwear outside of their clothes .....

And that people is probably why ZOS doesn't read these threads.......

I think it's awesome. To say that a company has taken the trouble to do something like this shows that they are passionate about getting this game right. I personally haven't heard of anything like this before and it proves to me that on the development side at least: They genuinely do care.

You can clearly see from the posts of some of the people going that they are veteran gamers looking out for the community as a whole, not just themselves.

I can only see a positive outcome from this, what better way to learn about what needs improving than by meeting F2F with people who play the game

yep

ExiledKhallisi wrote: »

R1ckyDaMan wrote: »

Like predicted, same experienced MMO guilds invited, the same ones as in beta's etc, Why not invite 20 die hard TES fans and ask em what they think?

Funny how the people they choose to attend these never seem to ask the questions the majority of players are concerned with.

The only question asked that has any real impact on the whole game community is the "lag" issues.

I don't think they are game jumpers, but I have to wonder, if these guys are in communication with all these different game developers, just why are those other games not active for them? Burn out? Or did the ideas they pushed forward with simply alienate a larger part of the player base and cause the games to collapse? I'm not trying to be cheeky, but if the same group of people has a hand in directing development in many different games and those games go on to fail, I have to wonder if that isn't part of the problem.

You can't target your audience and expect that to apply to all, that's why most realistic polls are randomized, to better represent people from all parts of life, assuming you actually want to know what the general public (or player base) is thinking.

Whether this does anything or not isn't likely to matter, not while this game still suffers from some serious balance and core coding problems and what is apparently a bias towards certain archetypes in PvP. Not to mention a predisposed view that guilds should be the basic unit of measurement and venue for game functionality, like buying and selling of virtual goods in game.

I know that during beta there were certain groups that were listened to more often than others. And, to be fair to them, they did bring up a lot of the issues that we deal with today (lack of buff timers, limited UI and so forth). Even when they addressed those issues to ZOS, ZOS still did their own thing. I am wondering if this has changed and if they are more open to suggestions at this point.

Was the purpose of the summit to show off the new toys or to listen to criticism and gather ideas for how to fix the problem areas of the game?

I am happy to get whatever scrap of information from the developers I can get. But it does frustrate me to no end that the developers go out of their way not to talk directly to us here on the forums.

Dominoid wrote: »

For those actually interested in what actually happened in the meetings instead of pure negative conjecture and conspiracy theories, here is a link to the full 12+ HOURS of audio from all meetings.

http://www.mostly-harmless-guild.com/forum/m/17294987/viewthread/16050470-zos-guild-summit-recordings/page/1

But ya know, continue to not have facts and tell us exactly what you think happened there and why.

Thank you for posting this.

I think players are just concerned they aren't being represented, that their issues and concerns aren't being addressed. I'm listening to the Champion system recording and while I love getting the information, what worries me is when Paul Sage says "You are the 1%."

So the only guild I will join is the Thieves Guild.
I wont do the other faction stuff for VR+.
Heck, I wont even become a WW or Vamp because that's not my character.

Exactly how was I or others like me represented at this 'meeting'?

adean27 wrote: »

Hello everyone,

I'm one of the attendees of the Guild Summit. I've read all your comments on here and I echo a lot of your sentiments.

So I will be the first to step out of the "shadows" and take the first bullet.

I cannot speak to the selection process other than the fact that we do not have 1000 members. Our gaming community is over 13 years old and is well established with a background in development testing in coordination with various developers.

My specific background ranges from Engineering, Military Leadership, and to MMO Development, as I spent some time working in the gaming industry. This gives me a unique outlook as I can translate the ideas of a player such as myself into a format that can work with a developer due to understanding how their business works.

We have participated as a guild since early beta and have chapters in both North America and Europe.

I generally send my input directly through the in-game report tools and we have members that respond to things in the forums on a very regular basis.

I went into this with a very simple direction in mind: I want to represent the community in a manner that will help this game succeed and survive so that we can all continue to play and enjoy it.

A lot of my questions and comments were directed with this in mind. Whenever I asked a question I always followed it up with a similar question in regards to how it would affect the casual community, PVE, PVP, and RP community as applicable.

The round tables allowed the developer to speak with us in a more intimate session. A conversation that could have taken weeks on the forums and many man hours of digging through a multitude of posts with opinions and ideas that vary so much it can be mind boggling to keep up, could be condensed into a few hours with mutual feedback.

As an example: In regards to certain lag issues we were able to get more information on how the servers work in regards to visual and skill effects and how that translates into lag on the client end. With that information it allowed us to go back and forth with suggestions on how that lag could be dealt with. Some of the ideas were plausible, some were not, some were more of a band-aid and not so much a repair. But it allowed us to chisel down those ideas to a few solid ones that could be very beneficial to everyone. This same process would have created a 20 page post on the forums with so many ideas and opinions that any sane person would not even know where to start.

Please do not think that we were ZOS puppets. At one point or another we were all at odds with various development teams. In fact I directly challenged Paul Sage on the justice system and the potential downfalls that could be caused by lag due to city PVP. After some back and forth banter we met in the middle, I still am not 100% behind his theory, and he is not 100% behind mine, but we both gave the other something to think about. Cyrodiil was a very hot topic and Brian Wheeler dealt with it very well, he was open to ideas and comments, he was very sympathetic to the issues and you could see a man that was really working hard to solve the issues. He spent a couple of hours under constant fire about PVP, and he wrote down every idea that was thrown at him. At one point one of the attendees gave him a file with 45 pages of issues and suggestions for Cyrodiil, and to his credit not only did he read it, he was able to talk about it the following day proving that he did indeed read them all. So hopefully this adds some more color to this process. I apologize that I haven't given you a plethora of information, but it's 2AM and I spent 10 hours in round table meetings today.

Focus groups are a staple in any industry, and they do work.

I know over the next few days there will be more information from those of us that attended as we organize our thoughts and information, but until them feel free to contact me and I will respond in as much detail as I can.

Thank you,

Andrew

Thanks for your response but I have to ask.....is this your first time participating on the official forums? I see your classified as "soul shriven". :wtf:

I was assuming the attendees were heavily involved in the community here.

@Dominoid Thank you for posting that. It makes things a lot easier. Also keep in mind that a lot of us chased down the developers in the hallway and continued our barrage of questioning and comments after the specific round table events.

Everyone has valid points here, and your feelings towards this are extremely understandable. No matter what happens you're going to be skeptical in some form or another, whether it be in terms of "Why wasn't I invited?" or "How can they represent us all?", and to be quite honest with all of you, I cannot answer the first question, but I can answer the second one. We can't represent you all, it's impossible, even these forums do not represent us all, there are many people that never speak out, but have their own views on where the game needs to go. But we can represent a large majority.

With that said, all of the hop topic issues were brought up and dealt with, the things that these forums get massacred with on a daily basis were covered. And then the lighter things were also covered.

I'm not going to attempt to rationalize the selection process, as I do not know the criteria and at this point it's a little redundant as it's a little too late. Instead I plan on digging through all the recordings and picking apart everything that was said and then addressing the issues that I find.

I felt that the PVE, PVP, Crafting, and RP guilds that were represented were very professional and useful. Keep in mind a lot of these people were jet lagged and rushed into ZOS where we sat in a dark room for several hours while we were shown Power Point presentations, even with that the questions, comments, and challenges that came from those that attended were impressive, and I feel that those people did the community proud.

Why do they not just use this forum? Is this honestly a quesion? Have most of you actually read through this forum? It's 98% utter rubbish, 2% content. Try tracking that, I can't. I pick certain posters and threads that I like and follow those, but that goes back to the whole "favoritism" issue, which perhaps justifies their focus group.

Without directly addressing each section of the round table events, I can tell you this. I saw a group of people working their rear ends of. At no point were there people sitting around a water cooler, or taking a nap. They were always working, from the artists, to the QA people. At one point I went to the bathroom earlier in the morning and had the opportunity to sneak a glance at an artist working on loading screens for new content. He was still meticulously working on the same loading screen 9 hours later, and it was beautiful. At second glance I couldn't see the difference, but then I saw the these fine details of shadows on background characters and such. The same goes for everyone else there, constantly working from the bottom to the top, and putting in massive amounts of hours. At no point did I ever see the office empty.

So what items did I have issues with specifically, and how did ZOS feel about those (And this is to just list a few until I can sort out my notes on the plane):

1. Cyrodiil, the massive lag spikes.

At one point the particle effect system was shown and how the draw distance on particle effects were seriously slowing down people's systems. They chose to implement a slide bar that allowed you to set a draw distance just on particle effects. Many of us felt that it wouldn't be effective as it now made it so that you couldn't see any effects outside of a set line, the problem this cause was that you couldn't actually see what was going on in a battle in the distance, so it gave you a very reduced time to plan your strategy. One of the ideas I put forth was giving the player control of the particle effects on their own system, allowing us to set a level of detail so that we could see effects but perhaps not a massive firework show, something a little less system heavy like a subdued shield around an individual. This idea was questioned by the developers to get more of an idea on what I meant, and they were unsure if it was even possible, but wrote it down and indicated that if it were possible to do, that it probably would help, and that they would see if they could do it in within their system limitations.

Another issue that was brought up was the changes in AoE and healing caps in order to force zergs to split up and work more strategically in smaller groups. Most of us thought this idea was not practical and would cause other issues. Our main worry was that instead of having a single person with an AoE that could take out a whole zerg striking fear into the hearts of that zerg causing them to divide, that we would instead just have a zerg of people using AoE and running through Cyrodiil dropping 40 Impulses at a time wiping out all forms of life they come across, which in turn would generate 100 times more lag than before. For that one, we agreed to see how it worked out on PTS and then reassess from there.

2. Cyrodiil, the misuse of Oil.

This one is easy. They are setting distance and location limitations on it.

3. Cyrodiil, the misuse of Forward Camps.

In regards to Forward Camps, it was asked "Why can't you just turn them off until they are fixed, or just get rid of them in general?". The response to this was that they used to follow that procedure, and Mercenaries was used an example, but they felt that by just turning off everything that was broken would have too many negative affects in the community. We argued that having an instant army spawn on you in a matter of seconds or having people dropping troll camps throughout the map was even more damaging, and that if something is that inherently broken or abused, that they need to just shut it down until they can fix it. Brian Wheeler seemed very open to this idea.

4. Potential lag issues created by the Justice System open world PVP.

This is a point I dealt with Paul on. He felt that large scale battles in towns would not affect server speeds. I politely disagreed. In order to explain this I need to get into more detail.

The Justice System is broken into two factions, Outlaws and Enforcers. You choose to join one or the other (currently you can pay to switch but it is quite expensive). Outlaws can only be attacked by an Enforcer when two things occur:

1. They are witnessed committing a crime and their Bounty rating is at a minimum required level.

2. The Enforcer is wearing his Enforcer tabard that now flags him for PVP in the world, making him always open to attack from Outlaws.

So there are some glaring issues with this, such as what is to stop a VR 14 from policing a level 5 area and one shot killing everyone, to how does this affect Cyrodiil, Craglorn, etc... as it allows me to attack my own faction.

To answer the first one, they felt that the player population would police itself, so if a VR 14 is killing low level Outlaws, that the high level Outlaws would show up and take care of it. In regards to Craglorn and Cyrodiil, the Justice System will be turned off in those places, and only used in the world at large.

Now what would stop a 40 vs 40 battle from going on in some of the busier cities and crashing the server. Honestly, nothing. It's not something that they are not recognizing as a problem, and the general feeling was that by people crashing it would self repair the issue because those people would no longer be there to cause lag. So this leads to another issue, what if the people that crash are not participating and are just there to use the bank? Well those people are now extremely annoyed and cancel their subscription. So with this in mind the team mentioned they plan on putting together a large scale PVP play test battle, and would like to see the same on PTS in order to see how this affects the server as a whole. I do not particularly like this idea, as I feel that those participating in the optional Justice System (you can turn it on or off in options) should be separated into instanced versions of the towns that are all Justice System based, so that it does not affect those that choose not to participate. But at least they are willing to test the option and then give us the power to veto it in force. I say veto as they have indicated that nothing is set in stone in this system and that they are working with as much feedback as they can digest.

5. Combat response and making it feel more cinematic and action based.
So one thing that was showcased by the Combat Responsiveness team was the flow of combat, how fast your character hit, and how the weapon connected with the monster. A current issue was that it felt very slow and when it hit the monster the weapon would slow down like it had hit glue. Sean Miller showed an upgrade that had been worked on that changed the speed of attacks and instead of the glue hit, it turned the blade and continued at normal speed like you were cutting into something, it was very well done and looked like a step in the right direction. Something I noticed while watching all the weapons work side by side was that the reason Dual Wield is so much is fun is that it is full of flamboyance and flourishes, where the character spins weapons, changes grips, comes from different angles, in comparison to swords and such where they are just chopping wood. I mentioned that I felt the other weapons should be more cinematic in their approach with little flourishes such as grip shifting, different forms of attack other than just slash, etc.. all on a visual scale, as it would increase the pace of combat and make it feel more grande on a scale fitting the pace of the non combat side of the game. This was something they took with an amount of zeal as it was something you could tell that they wanted to do, but had been forced to put on the back burner, so by us showing support as a group for a more flashy combat style, it really enforced to the upper levels that they may need to rethink their style a little.

6. Stop animation macros.

This one caused some contention. And I'm not sure where the company sits on it, but I know they don't like it. The solution to this was to pick a side, we told them either shut the animations off, which would cause whole other issues of extremely boring combat and monsters instantly doing everything, or commit to animations and balance the combat pace to make it feel more in depth.

Prioritizing key issues before adding fluff content.

This was something that came up time and time again. At what point was something a game breaking issue that needed to be fixed or was just fluff.
We indicated a lot of the Cyrodiil issues were priorities for the PVP team and until those things were fixed that we didn't want fluff, we just wanted to play PVP without wanting to logout and cancel our account.

As each team is dedicated to their specific allocation, they obviously how to work on said allocation. So if a team is dedicated to armor, they aren't setup to go and help with PVP, so they are required to work on fluff content, this is understandable and commendable that they continue working on content. We were mostly targeting those teams that were dedicated to things that are pushing players away. The most positive thing that came out of it was that we got to see that they were on track with this stuff, but were working hard against limitation set in the engine and system.

One person that I was continually impressed with was Brian Wheeler, and more so because I witness the constant flaming that he receives. He was very passionate and on the ball with his feelings and ideas. He had a very good attitude and direction that he thought was needed to be followed, and I would say majority, if not all of us felt he was more one of an "us", than a "them" in terms of how he viewed things. I know if most of you went to work everyday and someone told you how worthless, stupid, and pathetic you were, and then threatened you, or bullied you like he receives on the forums, that you would probably quit your job or worse. Somehow he's managed to ignore all that and keep focused on what he can do to make our experience better.

Now this is not just Brian, the whole team over there is this way. You see a lot of very enthusiastic and passionate people that are working ungodly hours to give us a game that meets our every requirement.

I will respond as I can, but I will be in flight today, so I apologize if I do not respond until this afternoon.

Thank you,

Andrew

The attitude in this thread stinks.

Being worried about your views being represented is one thing. Making snarky comments about the guilds and the people that were invited and their motives, is another. Especially when you don't even bother finding out who was invited, why, what what their views are or what they are about.

All the transparency in the world would not stop some people from spouting their rubbish conspiracy theories.